Eleanor Maguire, the UCL psychologist famous for her studies of the brains of London cabbies, is herself useless at wayfinding. This is just one of the revelations in Ed Yong's splendid report on her new study. This time Maguire followed trainee cabbies over time, observing how their training changed their brains.

Expertise is all about practice, right? Lots of it. We know that from books like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which have popularised the work of the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. But writing in the New York Times, David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz exhort us not to get too carried away. Yes, practice is very important for expertise and achievement. But so too are IQ and working memory, which are fairly stable characteristics.

On a related note. Neuroskeptic covers a new study that's looked at genetic associations with intelligence. "... [F]or people who do believe in the genetics of intelligence, this shows us that we have no idea what the genes are, and that everything published so far has been pretty much for naught."